Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Staunton, February 1 – Russia society
today is “extremely individualistic,” Larisa Nikolskaya says, with most people focusing
on their own survival rather than any broader goals, a pattern that simultaneously
prevents the formation of groups for the promotion of any political cause and
makes Russians less willing to sacrifice for the state than many think.

In Russia, the sociologist says,
there are “two types of social adaptation: active and inert. The active type is
characterized by an orientation toward initiative, entrepreneurialism, [and] a
readiness to accept change. The inert type, on the contrary, seeks to
strengthen the status quo, control from outside and stability and reproduction
of the self in an unchanged way.”

Polls show that about 40 percent of
Russians fall in the active category, about 37 percent in the inert one, and
some 23 percent manifest a combination of the two.And the attitudes of the two are very different
in many ways but profoundly the same in the Russian context in others,
Nikolskaya suggests.

“For Russians of the active type,
social justice is achieved through the securing of human rights, democracy and the
freedom of self-expression, but in Russia this is interpreted as having a
powerful state which unites various peoples.” For the inert, there is “a demand
for a harsh power which can secure order and also a return to traditional
values.”

Thus, there is support for a strong
state from both groups albeit for different reasons, but even support for the
state has its limits because of the extreme individualism of Russians.Some 56 percent of them say personal
interests are more important than anything else, while only 36 percent are “prepared
to sacrifice their own wellbeing for social goals.”

That pattern has been extremely
stable over time, the sociologist continues, but Pryanikov for his part argues
that “the syndrome of ‘negative family-ism’ has been again reproduced in the conditions
of the drawn-out financial-economic crisis.”And that in turn has led to the rise of “a new type of individualism,”
one hostile to cooperation and anyone’s rules but his or her own.

The Russian commentator cites the
earlier findings of Russian scholar V.V. Petukhov that “Russian individualism
is the individualism of people who have encountered difficult problems of
survival and therefore it does not yet give impulses for various forms of civic
and professional consolidation and solidarity.”

Nikolskaya says that this situation
is unlikely to improve and may get worse if the Russian powers that be continue
to operate without regard to the attitudes of the population whose members will
then increasingly view the state as yet another external group with which they
do not want to cooperate.

That points to an increase in the dangers
American political scientist R.D. Putnam pointed to in the 1990s.He suggested at that time that “in the
absence in society of mutuality and structures of civic involvement, the
variant of the Italian South – amoral family actions, clientelism, illegality, ineffective
rule and economic stagnation is a more likely outcome than democratization and
economic progress.”

Indeed, he
famously observed that the future of Moscow may be seen in the past and present
of Palermo, the hope of the Sicilian mafia. (See Putnam’s Making Democracy
Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, 1993). In the view of Pryanikov, the
situation in Russia has not gotten better but worse as he argues the research
of Nikolskaya shows.

“In
such circumstances,” Pryanikov continues, there is little reason to think that
Russians are likely to “strive to combine with one another for the resolution
of common problems.” Indeed, “they are step by step losing the ability to
collective resistance to those forces which crudely violate their rights and freedoms.”